MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE

No Joint Custody. Archinect reports that partners Farshid Moussavi and Alejandro Zaera-Polo of London-based Foreign Office Architects (FOA) have made their professional divorce official. According to a press statement, each partner will now head up his/her own office and all staff will be retained and assigned to one of the two.

London 27 April 2011

Dear Friend of FOA,

We are writing to inform you that after 16 years of successful collaboration we have agreed to split Foreign Office Architects (FOA) into two separate practices. FOA itself will cease to exist from around 28 April 2011. Over the past few years, we have both developed years individual interests which we now wish to pursue via independent practices. Farshid Moussavi will be practising as Farshid Moussavi Architecture Limited and Alejandro Zaera-Polo will be practising as AZPA Limited.

All current work for current clients will continue smoothly and all FOA staff will be offered
positions in the two new practices.

We would both like to thank you for your support and help for FOA over the years and hope that opportunities may arise for either or both of our successor practices to work with you in the future.

Yours sincerely

Farshid Moussavi

Alejandro Zaera-Polo

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More information

Alejandro Zaera-Polo

Alejandro Zaera-Polo is an architect and co-founder of London, Zurich and Princeton-based Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Maider Llaguno Architecture (AZPML).He graduated from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid with Honors and obtained an MARCH2 degree from Harvard GSD with Distinction. He worked at OMA in Rotterdam prior to establishing first FOA in 1993, and AZPA in 2011, the vehicles where he has developed a successful international professional practice since.

In parallel to his professional activities, Alejandro Zaera-Polo has developed a substantial role within academia. He was the Dean of the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam and currently occupies the Berlage Chair at the Technical university of Delft. He is also a Visiting Professor at Princeton University and the first recipient of the Norman R. Foster Visiting Professorship at Yale. He has published extensively as a theorist in El Croquis, Quaderns, A+U, Arch+, Volume, Log and many other international magazines and is a member of the London School of Economics Urban Age project.

FARSHID MOUSSAVI

Farshid Moussavi, born in Iran in 1965. Studied architecture at Dundee University, University College London’s Bartlett School of Architecture and Harvard Graduate School of Design. She worked at the Renzo Piano Building Workshop and the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) before co-founding Foreign Office Architects (FOA) in 1995 where she worked until its demerger in May 2011. She is Professor in Practice of Architecture at Harvard University, USA. She published "The Function of Ornament" in 2006, based on her research and teaching at Harvard, and the second volume, "The Function of Forms", in 2009.

Moussavi has also been a visiting professor at UCLA, Columbia and Princeton, and head of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. As well as serving on numerous international design juries, she is a trustee of the Whitechapel Gallery and Architecture Foundation in London, and a member of the Steering Committee of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture.

Farshid Moussavi Architecture (FAM)